On a flight to Easton Mountain
Retreat Center
in upstate New York for a gathering of “leaders” in gay spirituality, I
read David Ranan’s scathing report on the history and organizational
structure of the Catholic Church in regard to power and politics. As
disturbing as the book was, it was interesting reading and held my
attention even through all the distractions of air travel.

Ranan is surprisingly evenhanded and low-key in reporting on a history
of unbelievable abuse of power, corruption and hypocrisy (especially
regarding sexual ethics). In almost every case he calmly presents the
facts and explains that the various abuses seem to come from
organizational imperatives and maintenance concerns rather than from
flaws in doctrine. At times you wonder how he can keep cataloguing all
these apparent crimes against humanity without ever quite calling for
the abolition of the institution and the damnation of all its layers of
minions.

The book begins with an explanation of the structure of the Church and
particularly the Vatican authority. He explains the origins of the
church, the notion of miracles as evidence for authority, and the place
of sin—and the sacramental power to forgive sin—as a tool of social
control. The next chapters report on the Inquisition, the Index of
Forbidden Books and, specifically, the case against Galileo in the 17th
C. at the beginning of the development of scientific method and
observation as the source of truth (rather than religious authority or
revelation).

Poor Galileo, the Prelates showed the seventy-year-old man the
instruments of torture they’d use to question him and scared him into
recanting facts he’d seen with his own eyes about the movement of the
heavenly bodies. All because Psalm 104 says: “The earth is firmly
fixed; it shall not be moved.” Even a cursory reading of the verses in
context can see the Psalmist was praising the wonder of God’s creation,
not describing astrophysical dynamics! Yet for that verse, the advance
of Western science was delayed centuries. Of course, in the end, the
Church lost. And in due course the pope forgave Galileo. Though the
pope to do so was John Paul II in our own lifetimes—a little late. And
even then, JP II didn’t admit the Church was wrong, only that Galileo
turned out to have been right about the astronomy.

The next chapters deal with the corruption of popes, religious
violence, anti-Semitism (and the Holocaust). Some of the medieval popes
amassed huge fortunes that some passed on to their illegitimate
offspring, all the while calling the faithful to obey the rules about
avoiding sexual pleasure and giving generously to the Church. The list
of popes with offspring just goes on and on. Popes apparently don’t
have “children,” they have “nephews.” By the 20th C. these kinds of
abuses had disappeared, but there was still a Vatican banking scandal
around the time of the election of John Paul II. (Lucien Gregoire’s gay
consciousness-sourced book Murder in the Vatican, reviewed
previously in White Crane #67, gave the banking scandal even
more sinister overtones.)

Then there’s the chapter on sexual morality and the Church’s
intransigence with regard to issues like the dignity of women, divorce,
homosexuality, contraception and family planning, even condom use to
prevent the spread of AIDS. At every point, Ranan shows, the Church
opted to ignore human suffering and up-to-date solutions to age-old
problems and to insist instead on reiterating its errors from the past
in order to assert that it had never made any mistakes. A classic
example Ranan cites is telling women whose husbands are HIV+ that they
should trust in God’s will for their health since they are not
permitted to use condoms to prevent their infection.

And finally there’s a long discussion of the sexual abuse scandal that
has surfaced in the last decades. Ranan focuses mainly on the cover-up,
rather than the supposed evils of pedophilia itself, since that is the
institutionally generated criminality. The catalogue is long.

The conclusion the book reaches, a little equivocally, is that maybe
the Church needs dismantling, but that “matters of faith such as virgin
birth or transubstantiation” are not necessarily threatened by this
critique of the institutional structure.

I personally would go a bit further. Bringing a Buddhistic perspective
to question of the Catholic Church and its elaborate system of
doctrines, I’d say the bad behavior Double Cross documents is
empirical proof—like that Galileo saw with his own eyes—that there is
no God, at least the way the Church teaches, and that that God has no
power over human affairs and does not answer prayers. That’s a bold and
difficult assertion (though thoroughly and reverently Buddhist). But
some huge number of the prayers that go up daily from Catholics is for
the guidance of Church leaders. It is abundantly clear they aren’t
getting any divine guidance. The behavior of the Church doesn’t seem to
reflect any awareness at all of the teachings of Jesus about love
trumping rules.

Double Cross: The Code of Catholic Church certainly
challenged my affection and nostalgia for the religion of my youth. It
was much more readable and compelling than I’d expected. It’s
well-written and it is pretty convincing.
The final paragraph sums up the argument that gay people, in
particular, should take to heart: “Faithful Catholic liberals hope and
believe that change can be effected within the Church. They hope for
reform. Such reform, however, is unlikely to suffice. The shape-up
which is necessary is beyond the scope of a reform.”

Reviewed by Toby
Johnson, author
of Gay
Spirituality: Gay Identity and the Transformation of Human Consciousness,
The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph
Campbell and other novels and books

Toby Johnson, PhDis
author of nine books: three non-fiction books that apply the wisdom of
his
teacher and "wise old man," Joseph Campbell to modern-day social and
religious problems, four gay genre novels that dramatize spiritual
issues at the heart of gay identity, and two books on gay men's
spiritualities and the mystical experience of homosexuality and editor
of a collection of "myths" of gay men's consciousness.

Johnson's book
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of
Human Consciousness won a Lambda Literary Award in 2000.

His GAY
PERSPECTIVE: Things Our [Homo]sexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe was nominated for a Lammy in 2003. They
remain
in
print.

FINDING
YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth
of the Great Secret III tells the story of Johnson's learning the
real nature of religion and myth and discovering the spiritual
qualities of gay male consciousness.